The Baghdad Eucharist

Sinan Antoon, Maia Tabet

Description

An intimate and remarkably human novel of modern Iraq by an acclaimed Arab-American author, shortlisted for the Arabic Booker
An intimate and remarkably human novel of modern Iraq by an acclaimed Arab-American author, shortlisted for the Arabic Booker

Displaced by the sectarian violence in the city, Maha and her husband are taken in by a distant cousin, Youssef. As the growing turmoil around them seeps into their household, a rare argument breaks out between the elderly Youssef and his young guest. Born into sanctions and war, Maha knows nothing of Iraq's good years that Youssef holds dear.

Set over a single day, The Baghdad Eucharist is an intimate story of love, memory, and anguish in one Christian family.

Sujets

• World Literature
• Political
• Literary
• Religious
• Literature
• Sinan Antoon
• Iraq
• General officer
• Politics
• Middle East
• Baghdad
• General
• Irak
• Fiction
• Bagdad

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617977978
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sinan Antoon is an award-winning poet, novelist, and translator. He was born in Iraq, and moved to the United States in 1991 after the Gulf War. He received his PhD from Harvard University and is currently associate professor of Arabic literature at New York University. He is the author of two collections of poetry and four novels, including I‘jaam, The Corpse Washer, and Fihris (The Book of Collateral Damage).
The Baghdad Eucharist (published in Arabic as Ya Maryam) was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013.
Maia Tabet is a literary translator, journalist, and editor, who has translated prominent authors such as Elias Khoury. She was born in Beirut and is currently based in Baltimore in the United States.
*
“Faithfully reproduces the difficult conversations between an Iraqi Christian family housed in Baghdad while the daily scenes of carnage are painfully recounted.”
— The Guardian
“Antoon seems to just get better and better.”
— The National
“Sinan Antoon is one of the most talented of the younger generation of Iraqi writers to have emerged from the chaos of that country’s recent history.”
— Banipal
“The first novel to broach the tragedy of Iraqi Christians . . . narrating Iraq’s wounds in beautiful language.”
— as-Safir
“[A] panoramic view of Iraq, its history, its iconography and its bitter present . . . Antoon is fast becoming not only the voice of the disaffections of modern Iraq, but also one of the most acclaimed authors of the Arab world.”
— Al-Ahram Weekly
“Like a masterful filmmaker, twenty-four hours is all that Antoon needs to present a modern-day Iraqi tragedy in his elegant novel. . . . This is a novel that comes to grips with an explosive topic, yet does so without a loss of artistry.”
—Al Jazeera
The Baghdad Eucharist
Sinan Antoon
Translated by
Maia Tabet
This electronic edition published in 2017 by
Hoopoe
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
420 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018
www.hoopoefiction.com

Hoopoe is an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press
www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2012 by Sinan Antoon
First published in Arabic in 2012 as Ya Maryam by Dar al-Jamal
Protected under the Berne Convention

English translation copyright © 2017 by Maia Tabet

Published by arrangement with Rocking Chair Books Ltd and RAYA the agency for Arabic Literature

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 820 8
eISBN 978 1 61797 797 8

Version 1
He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
The Gospel according to John, 1:11
Living in the Past
1
“You’re just living in the past, Uncle!” Maha burst out as she ran from the living room after our argument. Luay, her husband, was upset and he called out after her, his face flushed.
“Hey, Maha, where are you going? Come back! Maha!” But she was already hurtling up the stairs that led to the second floor. He looked downcast as he apologized.
“Forgive her, Uncle. You know how much she loves and respects you.” In a voice speckled with shame, he added, “She’s a nervous wreck and can’t help herself.”
Before I could think of anything to say, the sound of her fitful sobbing reached us from the second floor.
“It’s all right. It’s no big deal. Go calm her down and comfort her,” I muttered.
I was sitting on a chair set smack in front of the television and Maha’s husband got up from the gray sofa where they had both been seated and came over to me. Placing his hand on my shoulder, he leaned down and kissed the top of my head.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I owe you.” He turned away and slowly climbed the stairs.
A host and his guest were having a heated discussion on television, and even though I was right up against the screen, their faces were nothing but a blur and I couldn’t tell what they were saying, despite their raised voices. All I could hear were the words ringing in my ears, “You’re just living in the past, Uncle!”
2
I didn’t sleep well that night. I tossed in the dark as Maha’s stinging pronouncement played over and over in my head. I kept asking myself whether I really did live in the past, but all I could come up with were further questions. How could someone my age, to some degree or another, not live in the past? Being in my seventies, most of my life was behind me and very little of it still lay ahead. She, on the other hand, was in her early twenties and, however gloomy the present may be, she still had her whole future before her. She was kindhearted and meant well but she was only half formed. Just like her past. She too would begin to revisit the past once it had grown a little, and she would dwell on it for hours—even were it to consist of nothing but misery. Her wounds would heal and she would retain only what was best. In any case, for me to stop living in the past, it would have to be dead. And it clearly wasn’t—the past was alive and well, in one form or another, and it not only coexisted with the present, but continued to wrangle with it. Perhaps it was just being held captive inside the frames of all the snapshots hanging on the walls of the house, suspended along the mile-long walls of my memory, and lying between the covers of our photo albums? Hadn’t she stood before them often enough and asked me to point out different family members and questioned me about what had happened to them, where they were now, how they had died, and when? How often had she asked me to tell her the stories contained within those frames? I had always responded to her questions readily, coloring in the details and following various threads that sometimes led to other photos or to other stories that hadn’t been captured by the camera’s lens—stories laced with sighs of pleasure or with laughter that were lodged in my memory, and others that were preserved in an archive guarded by my heart.
Was I really escaping the present and seeking refuge in the past, as she alleged? Even if it were true, was there shame in it when the present was no more than a booby-trapped snare full of car bombs, brutality, and horror? Perhaps the past was like the garden which I so loved and which I tended as if it were my own daughter, just in order to escape the noise and ugliness of the world. My own paradise in the heart of hell, my own ‘autonomous region’ as I sometimes liked to call it. I would do anything to defend that garden, and the house, because they were all I had left. I really had to forgive her. My youth was not her youth, her time and my time were worlds apart. Her green eyes fluttered open to the ravages of war and sanctions; deprivation, violence, and displacement were the first things she tasted in life. I, on the other hand, had lived in prosperous times, which I still remembered and continued to believe were real.
3
I woke at 6:30, as I had done for many years, without the use of an alarm clock. My bladder, which awakened me several times a night, was all the alarm I needed. I washed my face and shaved in front of the mirror in the bathroom by my bedroom, but didn’t break out into one of my favorite songs, as was my habit, because I wanted to recapture the details of my dream. I took my dentures out of their glass of water, opened my mouth, and secured them in place. I had lost my teeth years ago, and I eventually grew used to the dentures, despite having found them uncomfortable for a while. I was proud that I still had a full head of thick, albeit white, hair. Anything but baldness!
In the dream, I had gone bald and that alone made it feel more like a nightmare. The house had been the same in every particular, except that it was a museum. Each room had become a hall with cordoned-off chairs and beds, and there were signs everywhere warning visitors not to touch or get too close. I was the docent, and as I recounted the history of each room, I explained who had lived there and where they had gone. Although I heard whispering and giggling, the rooms were empty. I went from hall to hall looking for visitors but there was no one around. Then, I heard a voice that belonged to a man who was leading a group of visitors down the hallway but he was giving them faulty information about the house. I went toward them and shouted, “This is my house, and I am the docent here.” But no one heard me or took any notice. I looked in the mirror and saw that I was bald.
I combed my hair and thanked my lucky stars I still had all of it. I opened my eyes wide and peered into my face in the mirror, raising my thick gray eyebrows slowly and crunching together the wrinkles time had etched onto my brow. I stepped back from the mirror, and dried my face and forehead one last time.
On my way from the bathroom to the kitchen to make tea, I stopped in front of the hallway calendar, just as I had done for years. Even after I had retired and there was no longer any business to attend to or any appointments to keep, I never gave up the habit. I’d stop in the hallway and signal the beginning of a new day by crossing out the previous one on the calendar. I would do this using a pencil that hung by a thread from the nail that held the calendar in place. I looked at the current month’s photograph of an empty bench with a few yellowed leaves scattered on the paving stones in front of it; a fall wind had blown the leaves down from a nearby tree, whose trunk alone was visible. Below the photograph, only one day remained, the last day of the month of October 2010, whi